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Tim Bray has made a suggestion that we should have an additional HTTP status code. We're all aware of the 404 page, where whatever it is that we were looking for cannot be found. There's also the 403 page, or status code, which tells us that you don't have permission to see whatever it is that you're looking for.

Bray's suggestion is that given the increasing censorship of the internet we need to have a code which shows when something is censored. Please note that neither I nor he are using this word "censor" as meaning some vile propagandistic denial of free speech or the free flow of information. There are other reasons why such a page or code might be used.

Just as examples, the libel laws of England and Wales are famously severe and yes, the downloading of a web page by someone in that legal jurisdiction is counted as "publication" for the purposes of such law. Or holocaust denial is a crime in Germany. Rather than the vile ahistorical but exercise of free speech rights that it is in much of the world. Or France (and Germany, Austria etc) bans the resale of Nazi memorabilia and Yahoo at least has had to block some pages in those countries.

It's also true that the page might be served up precisely because it really is censorship. As Bray's own example shows:

Or as it would actually appear:

HTTP/1.1 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons Content-Type: text/html

Unavailable For Legal Reasons

Unavailable For Legal Reasons

This request may not be serviced in the Roman Province of Judea due to Lex3515, the Legem Ne Subversionem Act of AUC755, which disallows access to resources hosted on servers deemed to be operated by the Judean Liberation Front.

His suggestion is, as you can see, that both the fact of the unavailability of the page and the law responsible should be shown.

And of course, there's also the great joy of remembering Ray Bradbury in this way: Fahrenheit 451 being the recently deceased auther's novel all about that very censorship.

Not that I get to have any say in such a decision nor any influence over the outcome but it all sounds like a very good idea to me indeed.